


Plastic Pumpkins

by DiscordantWords



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Early Days, Gen, Halloween, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 06:44:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5118965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/pseuds/DiscordantWords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course Mulder doesn't like Halloween. The world expects someone like Mulder to like Halloween. He's not playing the rebel by festooning the office with gravestones and ghosts, with black cats and plastic pumpkins, he's playing against type by <em>not</em> doing so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plastic Pumpkins

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!
> 
> I offer up this little treat (no tricks!): a moment between Season 1 era Mulder and Scully.

*

There is a grinning plastic Jack-o-lantern upstairs in the bullpen, half-filled with miniature Snickers bars. It is the only visible concession to the season; federal agents are not, as a general rule, known for their decorating aplomb. 

Because none of the agents upstairs are inclined to deck out their offices with spiderwebs or ghosts or skeletons, and because Mulder is, at heart, the type of person who enjoys bucking tradition just to get a reaction, Scully is uncertain what to expect as she clicks down the hall towards the basement office.

She is mildly tensed, expecting, at the very least, some sort of loud, startling noise or flapping bat or even Mulder himself, rising out of a coffin behind his desk in stage makeup and gleaming vampire fangs.  
But the office looks normal, drab even, if one ignores the blurry photos pinned to the walls. Not a ghostie or beastie or witch in sight. Not even candy corn. 

She feels an odd furl of disappointment even as the tension bleeds from her shoulders. She shouldn't feel disappointed. She is alarmingly easy to startle, always has been, and while she enjoys a good fright as well as the next person she should be pleased that it doesn't come at the expense of her professional reputation. 

"Morning," Mulder says from behind her, and dammit, she _does_ jump, even as she turns to see him moving past with a cup of coffee, dressed in a perfectly ordinary gray suit. 

He gives her an odd considering look as he goes to sit behind his desk. 

"It's Halloween," she says, crossing her arms. 

He nods slowly, studying her face. He is still sussing her out, she thinks. And she, him. 

"Were you expecting me to arrive in costume?" he asks finally. "Perhaps draped in a bedsheet? The ghost of Spooky Mulder, forever roaming the halls of the Hoover Building?" 

She shakes her head, instantly defensive even if that is, exactly, along the lines she had been thinking. "No, it's just—"

He tilts his head, leans back in his chair, waits for her to continue. 

"It seems like it would be your kind of holiday," she finishes lamely, waving her hands towards the pictures on the walls. "Aliens and sasquatches and unexplainable things that go bump in the night." 

"Sasquatch," Mulder corrects. "Most reports only reference one creature." 

"Oh, of course. My mistake," she says. 

"The boys upstairs are talking about a serial case where the guy carves his victims' faces up to look like Jack-o-lanterns," he offers with a bit of a shit-eating grin. "I could pull some strings, see if I can get us on board." 

She grimaces. "No. Thank you." 

"Then I'm afraid you're out of luck. Unless you want to investigate the missing candy in Section Chief Blevins' office. Rumor has it his secretary is really pissed off."

"No haunted houses to stake out? Graveyards?" She prods at him gently, because there can't be _nothing,_ this is _Mulder._

He makes a face. "That's a bit of a cliché, isn't it Scully?" 

Of _course_ Mulder doesn't like Halloween. The world expects someone like Mulder to like Halloween. He's not playing the rebel by festooning the office with gravestones and ghosts, with black cats and plastic pumpkins, he's playing against type by _not_ doing so. 

(Years from now, he will say something derisive about trick-or-treaters and she will roll over in bed to swat his bare chest and tell him "You're full of crap, Mulder, I know you've already bought the candy" because he'll have hidden it in the hallway closet, behind the trench coat he no longer has cause to wear, and because she knows he is secretly pleased by every pint-sized goblin and superhero that dares darken their door. But that it years away, and she has no reason to know that now.)

For now, she is simply surprised, and then unsurprised, and files this bit of information away in the ever-evolving dossier she is starting to form on Fox Mulder. 

They spend an uneventful hour doing paperwork, and though she does wonder at the turn her life has taken recently that writing up a case about a vengeful sentient computer program can be considered "uneventful", there are no surprises and no scares and nothing even approaching what she'd expected Halloween day in the X Files division to entail. 

At half-past ten she stands and stretches, vertebrae yielding satisfying pops. 

"I need a cup of coffee," she tells Mulder, who looks completely absorbed in a magazine article about werewolves. She almost asks him what kind of magazine purports to publish serious articles about werewolves, and then decides that she'd rather not know. 

She bypasses the oft-neglected coffee pot nearest their office and instead goes back upstairs to the well-lit and bustling bullpen. 

"Oh hey," Greg from accounting smiles at her as she stands stirring in the milk and sugar. "You're still with us. That's good." His voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. "Seen anything…spooky yet?" 

She gives him a smile, takes a sip of coffee to avoid answering as she makes her exit. 

There is an agent showing off pictures of his kids in their costumes and she pauses to admire their grinning, made-up faces. It triggers a sudden nostalgia in her for days long past, trudging up and down streets clinging on to Bill's hand, listening to his (mostly) good-natured complaints while her mother looked on fondly from a distance. 

Her thoughts turn to Mulder, and she thinks it must have been much the same—he the perpetually complaining big brother, leading his costumed and adoring kid sister through the neighborhood in search of candy. It occurs to her, as it often does at odd times, how many things that are cause for joy in other people must bring him small sorrows; all those holidays and birthdays and missed moments. 

The people that surround them, they see the weirdness; the glib humor, the aliens, the uncomfortable way he has of getting inside someone's head and ferreting out the truly dark. The picture of the grinning little girl on his desk is a monument to that weirdness, _Samantha Mulder Abducted by Aliens! _, but it is also very much a symbol of deep sadness, unhealed wounds.__

__The thought is a somber one, a sobering one, and leaves her feeling a bit chagrined at her own reaction to the lack of seasonal accoutrements earlier in the day. She takes an extra handful of candy out of the plastic pumpkin on her way back downstairs, a small peace offering for an offense she did not commit out loud._ _

__Mulder is shrugging into his coat when she steps back into their office, and she feels the slight quickening in her pulse that always comes with a new case._ _

__"Something come in?"_ _

__He gives her a crooked smile, waves a file folder in her direction. "Victim by the name of Regina Grossman. Her remains were discovered in the front yard of her home. Neighbors thought it was part of a Halloween decoration, and only called it in after a few days when it began to smell. Coroner's report says she'd been dead for about three days."_ _

__She wrinkles her nose, accepts the file. "Lovely. And certainly befitting the season, I'll give you that. But where's the X File?"_ _

__Mulder grins, then, really grins, brushing past her through the door, and calls over his shoulder, "Because according to all available records, Regina Grossman died six years ago!"_ _

__She cocks her head, considering for a moment. Then she smiles, a small, private smile that he does not see, and follows him down the hall. She leaves the candies on his desk._ _


End file.
